Brass Items 1 of 5

(2 photos)

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The sun is shining, and some of the haze is burning off, but still can’t see much of the mountains or the nearby Neuschwanstein Castle. As we walked around the town of Fussen, Germany, this morning, Emmy saw a lot of brass and copper pots again, but most were priced too high, even for her. Then Emmy saw a brass charcoal burner she was tempted to buy. (Maybe two feet high with a high peaked lid, eighteen inches in diameter, with six solid brass legs.) Claimed she had seen one something like it for $500, near Carmel, California. Poor baby, just couldn’t convince herself to buy it.

We then drove on to Garmisch, Germany, at the foot of the Zugspitze mountain for the weekend.

Emmy has been thinking, and that can be expensive. Emmy, surprise surprise, decided she must have the brass charcoal stove we saw in Fussen last Friday, so here we go. Just to be different, we are going into Austria, and will drive through that country and cross the border back into Germany, near Fussen.

Most non-food stores would not be open until noon or later on a Monday, but finally the most important store opened, and the brass charcoal stove was there, momentarily. It’s now in the camper. Of course there is nearly no room for us anymore. The lady in Fussen’s antique store said the stove was 150 years old. Must be antique, the metal was cold. Does look old, does look used, does look nice, does have a Turkish style and flair!
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Here again, the story is almost more interesting than the object. We first tried to buy a brass scoop (that are used to weigh produce in the markets in Yugoslavia) in 1980, but it took four visits over ten years! During each visit I tried to buy one of the scoops, all over the country. We saw them a dozen places, at least.

We asked many places, and they looked at us like we were crazy. Finally one man asked $200 American, then laughed. At one market on the island of Hvar, a young lady said, partly in English, “These are not ours.” We were finally able to determine that the vendors rented the scales each market day, and the scoop did not belong to them.

Finally at the marketplace next to the harbor in Starigard, on the Yugoslavian island of Hvar, Jim finally bought a brass scoop from one of the fruit vendors. Whoops, a few minutes later the man came to the camper (we were eating lunch in the RV while parked along Starigard’s harbor), and asked for it back. He would be out of business for the rest of the day, and he just didn’t want to sell anyway.

During our visit in Split in 1989 we walked around the market place, bought some cherries, and would you believe it, we really did buy one of the brass scoops from a young man at a market stall in Split!

Of course it was worth the effort, and it had been fun.